Many of today's electronic media devices come equipped with remote control capabilities. A remote control device acts at a distance to send and, in many instances, receive information from an electronic media device. Such electronic media devices may include, for example, video game consoles, set-top boxes used to receive satellite and cable transmissions, digital versatile disc (DVD) players, Blu-ray disc players, and audio playback systems, to name a few.
In video gaming systems, remote control devices may be used to select options and preferences, control movements and actions of characters or objects in a video game, and provide feedback to the user in the form of vibrations, sound, and light. Many video games and video game consoles have user specific options and preferences that may be selected during various stages of game play using a remote control device. Often a user's specific options and preferences remain static or change very little over time. Although a given user's options and preferences for a video game or video game console may generally remain static, a user's specific options and preferences ordinarily must be reselected after each video game playing session or after game play by a subsequent user.
Conventional approaches have attempted to solve the following drawback of video game systems and, in general, media devices by prompting the user to save and associate options and preferences with an identifying characteristic of the user, such as a nickname. In this way, a user may manually restore their options and preferences the next time the media device is used by selecting the identifying characteristic associated with their stored options and preferences. The requirement for a user to manually store, associate, and reload options and preferences in this conventional approach is not ideal and may detract from the entertainment value of these electronic media devices.
Therefore, what is needed is a system and method for retaining, associating, and reloading user specific options and preferences without requiring active participation from the user.
The present invention will be described with reference to the accompanying drawings. The drawing in which an element first appears is typically indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.